Beyond Maximilian’s Empire: French Travelers and Explorers Throughout Nineteenth-Century Mexico

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Notes

¹ A classic work on French diplomacy is Nancy Barker, The French Experience in Mexico, 1821–1861: A History of Constant Misunderstanding (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979); for a more recent work see Edward Shawcross, France, Mexico and Informal Empire in Latin America, 1820–1867: Equilibrium in the New World (London: Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2018). For a recent work on the French Intervention in Mexico see Noah Glaser, The Age of Regeneration: Capitalism and the French Intervention in Mexico (1861–1867), Ph.D., diss. (University of Illinois, Chicago, 2022).

² On French travelers in Mexico see Javier Pérez Siller, ed., México Francia. Memoria de una sensibilidad común, siglos XIX-XX (México: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla/El Colegio de San Luis/Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, 1998); and Jean Meyer, Yo, el francés (Tusquets, 2011).

³ On French geography see Anne Marie Claire Godlweska, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999); for a work on Mexican geography see Carlos Herrejón Peredo, ed., La formación geográfica de México (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2011).

⁴ See Carl Thompson, French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Carl Thompson, “The Romantic Literary Travel Book,” in The Routledge Companion of Travel Writings, ed. Carl Thompson (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 269–277.

⁵ According to some scholarly interpretations, Ferry’s mercantile pursuits in Mexico could be conceptualized as contributing to “informal empire”(see Noah Glaser’s contribution to this special issue for an extended discussion of “informal empire”). At one moment or another, Domenech and Charnay were involved in French imperial endeavors. Covarrubias mentions Domenech’s participation in the French Scientific Expedition in Mexico. Martínez’s article highlights the ways in which Charnay enhanced France’s empire symbolically by promoting the collection and display of Mexican artifacts in France. For a study of the British case, e.g. collecting exotic artifacts in the British museum, see Robert Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

⁶ For an overview of Mexican immigration policy see, Robert Duncan, For the Good of the Country: State and Nation Building during Maximilian’s Mexican Empire, 1864–67. Ph.D. diss. (University California, Irvine, 2001), pp. 121–222.

⁷ Magnus Morner, “European Travelogues as Sources to Latin American History from the Late Eighteenth Century to 1870,” Revista de Historia de América no. 93 (Jan.–Jun., 1982), pp. 91–149

⁸ Nancy Barker, “The French Colony in Mexico, 1821–61: Generator of Intervention,” French Historical Studies 9, no. 4 (1976), pp. 596–618, esp. 600.

⁹ Berny Sèbe, “The Making of British and French Legends of Exploration, 1821–1914,” in Reinterpreting Exploration: The West and the World, ed. Dane Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 109–34, esp. 113. On French academic societies more broadly see Alain Corbin, Terra Incognita, trans. Susan Pickford (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2021), pp. 175–87.

¹⁰ Marius Warholm Haugen, “News of Travels, Travelling News: The Mediation of Travel and Exploration in the Gazette de France and the Journal de l’Empire,” in Travelling Chronicles: News and Newspapers from the Early Modern Period to the Eighteenth Century, eds. Siv Gøril Brandtzæg, Paul Goring and Christine Watson (Brill, 2018), pp. 159–180.

¹¹ Sèbe, “The Making of British and French Legends of Exploration,” p. 113. For a discussion of the coverage of explorers in the new journalism see Richard Weiner, “Verbalizing Exploration,” in A Cultural History of Exploration, vol. 5, ed. Jane Samson (Bloomsbury, [forthcoming] 2024).

¹² Jean-Yves Puyo, “The French Military Confront Mexico’s Geography,” Journal of Latin American Geography 9, no. 2 (2010), pp. 139–57, esp. 142.

¹³ Nicolaas Rupke, “A Geography of the Enlightenment: The Critical Reception of Alexander von Humboldt’s Work,” in Geography and Enlightenment, eds. David Livingstone and Charles Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 319–38.

¹⁴ Puyo, “The French Military Confront Mexico’s Geography,” p. 141.

¹⁵ Chevalier cites Humboldt extensively in Michel Chevalier, Mexico Ancient and Modern, vols. 1 & 2, trans. Thomas Alpass (London: John Maxwell, 1864).

¹⁶ Francisco Altable, Edward Beatty, José Enrique Covarrubias, Richard Weiner, El mito de una riqueza proverbial. Ideas, utopías y proyectos económicos en torno a México en los siglos XVIII y XIX (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2015), pp. 19–78.

¹⁷ Gerardo Manuel Medina Reyes, e-mail message to authors, March 7, 2024.

¹⁸ On the friendship between Jefferson and Humboldt see, Sandra Rebok, Humboldt and Jefferson: A Transatlantic Friendship of the Enlightenment (London: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

¹⁹ James Ronda, “Exploring the American West in the Age of Jefferson,” in North American Exploration: A Contentent Comprehended, vol. 3, ed. John Logan Allen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 9–74.

²⁰ For an article that emphasizes the diverse themes broached in a travelogue (e.g. scientific, economic, and cultural) see Robert Duncan, “‘Beneath a rich blaze of golden sunlight:’ the Travels of Archduke Maximilian through Brazil, 1860,” Terrae Incognitae 52, no. 1 (April, 2020), pp. 37–64. For a discussion of the different themes examined in travelogues, see Richard Weiner, “Verbalizing Exploration.”

²¹ In Seven-Years’ Residence in the Great Deserts of North-América (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), Domenech cites Humboldt, but mostly regarding the history of migrations to the Americas, not the geography of the United States, Texas, or northeastern Mexico. José Enrique Covarrubias, e-mail message to authors, March 6, 2024.

²² Gary S. Dunbar, “‘The Compass Follows the Flag:’ The French Scientific Mission to Mexico, 1864–1867,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78, no. 2 (June 1988), pp. 229–40, esp. 232.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Paul Edison, Latinizing America: The French Scientific Study of Mexico, 1830–1930, Ph.D. thesis (Columbia University, 1999), p. 269.

²⁵ See, for example, Rafael de Castro, La cuestion mexicana ó esposicion de las causas que hacian indispensables la intervencion europea y el restablecimiento de la Monarquia en Mexico (Mexico City: Andrade y F. Escalante, 1864); and E. Masseras, El Programa del Imperio Mexico (Mexico City: Liberia Mexicana, 1864).

²⁶ Dunbar, “The French Scientific Mission,” p. 237.

²⁷ Emmanuel Domenech, Journal d’un missionaire au Texas et au Mexique, 1846–1852 (Paris: Librairie de Gaume Frères, 1857), p. 422.

²⁸ Edison, Latinizing Latin America, p. 232

²⁹ Edison, Latinizing Latin America, p. 235

³⁰ Dunbar, “The French Scientific Mission,” p. 234.

³¹ John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico (Chicago, IL: C.H. Kerr & Co., 1911), pp. 11–12. On Turner in Mexico see Linda Lumsden, “Socialist Muckraker John Kenneth Turner: The Twenty-First Century Relevance of a Journalist/Activist’s Career,” American Journalism 32 no. 3 (2015), pp. 282–306.

³² Christen Mucher, “Collecting Native America: John Lloyd Stephens and the Rhetorics of Archaeological Value,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 9 no. 1 (2018), pp. 3–34.

³³ John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, Vol. I (Perlego, 2010), p. 232.

³⁴ Gesa Mackenthun, “Imperial Archaeology: The American Isthmus as Contested Scientific Contact Zone,” in Surveying the American Tropics : A Literary Geography from New York to Rio, eds. Maria Cristina Fumagalli, et al. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 101–130.

³⁵ “Charnay only mentions Humboldt in the preface to his 1885 work (Les anciennes Villes du noveau monde), where he returns to Humboldt as one of those who had already mentioned the cultural unity of the Toltecs and Mayans,” Julieta Martínez, e-mail message to authors, March 9, 2024.

³⁶ Sèbe, “The Making of British and French Legends of Exploration.” For a broader discussion of the characterization of explorers as heroes, see Mylynka Kilgore Cardona, “The Ideal and Idealized Explorer Typologies,” in A Cultural History of Exploration, vol. 5, ed. Jane Samson (Bloomsbury. [forthcoming] 2024].In Seven-Years’ Residence in the Great Deserts of North-América (London: Longman, Green

³⁷ Edison, Latinizing Latin America, p. 365.

³⁸ Ibid, p. 367.

³⁹ “Claude-Joseph-Désiré Charnay,” Encyclopædia Britannica, February 22, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Claude-Joseph-Desire-Charnay.

⁴⁰ Edison, Latinizing Latin America, p. 368.

⁴¹ Ibid, p. 377.

⁴² Ibid, p. 384.

⁴³ “French Guiana,” Encyclopædia Britannica, March 17, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/place/French-Guiana/Government-and-society#ref2490.

⁴⁴ Stephen Bell, “Aimé Bonpland and Merinomania in Southern South America,” The Americas 51, no. 3 (January 1995), pp. 301–23, esp. 302.

⁴⁵ Eduardo Ottone, “Aimé Bonpland’s Drawings of Itá Pucú, 1834, and the History of Early Geological Representations in Argentina,” Earth Sciences History 23, no. 1 (January 1, 2004), pp. 121–33, esp. 125.

⁴⁶ Ibid, p. 128.

⁴⁷ Ibid, p. 130.

⁴⁸ Bell, Merinomania in Southern South America, p. 303.

⁴⁹ Karen Macknow Lisboa and Amilcar Torrão Filho, “French Travelers in the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century – in Brazil and in Africa,” Transatlantic Cultures (April 2022) https://transatlantic-cultures.org/en/catalog/viajantes-franceses-no-mundo-atlantico-do-seculo-xix-no-brasil-e-na-africa, p. 2.

⁵⁰ Lisboa and Filho, French Travelers in the Atlantic World, p. 4

⁵¹ Ibid.

⁵² Federico Ferretti, “Tropicality, the Unruly Atlantic and Social Utopias: The French Explorer Henri Coudrea (1859 − 1899),” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 38, no. 3 (July 31, 2017), pp. 332–49, esp. 332.

⁵³ Ibid, p. 337.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ Ibid, p. 338.